oc postscript

7/31/2019 Oc Postscript

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WORKERS AND CAPITAL*

Mario Tronti

The Progressive Era

The working class after Marx can be approached historically in two ways. One is chronological.

It reconstructs the great cycles of the labor struggle from the 1870s, followed by a series of facts

that constitute its history. It would include the history of labor in industry, of industry in capital,

of capital in politics and in political events, along with the great theorization - what was once

called the history of ideas - the first sociology, the last systematic form attained by economics,

and the birth of a new scientific discipline: that theory of technological reality which is the

science of labor and the enemy of the worker. Traditional historiography encapsulates it between

1870 and 1914. To be generous and to avoid constantly upsetting the mental habits of the average

intellectual, it may even be possible to enclose this epoch's first great block of facts in "their"history and move towards us and the new labor struggles constituting the real political drama of

our side of the story - even if it is only at its beginning. The other approach is to move through

great historical events by pausing on macroscopic groups of facts yet untouched by the critical

consciousness of labor thought (Pensiero operaio) and therefore excluded from a class

understanding that translates them into a political use of their consequences. When relevant, these

events isolate a fundamental aspect of capitalist society. They cut a cross-section that goes from a

series of struggles to a set of political-institutional, scientific, or organizational answers When we

can isolate such a typical event under propitious circumstances, we are confronted with an

historical model, a privileged period for research, and a promised land of facts, thoughts and

actions to be explored. What can be learned k far superior to any passive chronological accountof indifferent past events. The alternative is between a narrative embodying an interpretation (i.e.,

the old pretense of historical objectivism), and its contrary: interpretation embodying a narrative

(i.e., the new pat of political research from the labor viewpoint). The choice is between history

andpolitics: two legitimate horizons for two different classes.

There is a danger involved, which is at the same time an adventure of ideas: to connect and see

together different things that specialists have convinced us to always keep separate. The neo-

synthetic conceptual apparatus of labor's viewpoint can hardly avoid this temptation. Thus, it is

incredible that the history of labor and the history of labor struggles have been and continue to be

dealt with by different experts. It is as incredible as the way economic theory is separated frompolitical thought as if they actually were two doctrines, two departments or two different

academic disciplines. It is incredible how industrial sociology - the only one worth considering -

once separated from the macroscopic problems of the socialization brought about by capitalist

industrialization ultimately reduces to shop-microanalysis. It is not difficult to connect

Haymarket Square with the Knights of Labor, the cannon of Homestead, Pennsylvania (1892) and

the strike of the company town of Pullman (1894) with the birth of the AFL in Lawrence,

Massachusetts (1932) and Paterson, New Jersey (1914) with the Wobblies' call "union makes us


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strong." Struggle and organization resembled each other so much that even the blind could see

them united. Richard Hofstadter, in his The Age of Reform, relates the American progressivism of

the 1890-1920 period to the somewhat eccentric pseudo-conservatism of our time. "The relations

of capital and labor, the condition of the masses in the slums, the exploitation of the labor of

women and children, the necessity of establishing certain minimal standards of social decency -

these problems filled them with concern both because they felt a sincere interest in the welfare ofthe victims of industrialism and because they feared that to neglect them would invite social

disintegration and ultimate catastrophe." 1 The recent history of capitalist initiative begins when,

unlike President Hayes' handling of the 1887 railroad strikes or President Cleveland's handling of

the Pullman affairs, in 1902 Theodore Roosevelt breaks the great strike of anthracite workers not

by sending in federal troops but by means of a well-conceived arbitration, and in the same year he

undertakes legal action against J. Pierpont Morgan's Northern Security Company in order to show

public opinion that the country was run by Washington and not by Wall Street. It is no longer just

political progressivism aimed at the conservation of society - something as old as human society

itself- but a new form of political management of social relations and of the private ownership of

the means of production. It is a new way of reunification and clash between general interest andindividual capitalists' profit. between government Of the res publica and production for capital.

"To realize the importance of the change in the United States itself one need only think of the

climate of opinion in which the Pullman strike and the Homestead strike were fought out and

compare it with the atmosphere in which labor organization has taken place since the Progressive

era. There has of course been violence and bloodshed, but in the twentieth century a massive

labor movement has been built with far less cost in these respects than it cost the American

working class merely to man the machines of American industry in the period from 1865 to

1900."2, In its two faces of labor violence and capitalist reformism, the Progressive Era is the first

great historical event to be dealt with. Here, the relationship between the labor struggles and

organization, and capital's initiative describes a typical path. Later it will reach higher levelsthrough higher experiences, but only after long pauses which will continually throw the problem

in the fog of the past. Obviously, to find the revolution in action one need not go to the U.S. Yet,

the American class-struggles are more serious than European ones in that they obtain more

results with less ideology. More on this later. For now it is well to keep in mind Mr. Dooley's

Dissertations of 1906 Mr Dooley (Finley Peter Dunne) has been regarded as one of the sharpest

commentators of that epoch who understood very well its character when he said: "Th' noise ye

hear is not th' first gun in a revolution. It's on'y th' people in the United States beatin' a carpet." 3

The Age of Marshall

What in the U.S. appears as the relation between labor struggles and capitalist politics reappears

during the same period in England as the relation between the movement of the struggles and the

capitalist answer on the level of science. Capital's American answer always seeks to

institutionally deal with these things within the terrain of political initiative by the head of the

state, in the rare and precious occasions when this head subjectively overcomes the most modern

intelligence objectified in the system of production. Contrary to common opinion, England offers


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a high theoretical synthesis of the class-struggle from the capitalist viewpoint. From the fact that

Hegel once lived in Germany it does not follow that we should always locate there the moment of

capital's maximum self-consciousness. If economics is the science par excellence of relations of

production, exchange, and consumption of commodities as capital (and therefore of labor, and

labor-struggles as capitalist development), then no higher elaboration of this science can be found

than in English economic thought. When Marshall claimed: "it is all in Smith," he forced thoseafter him to say: "it is all in Marshall." As Schumpeter put it, his great accomplishment "is the

classical achievement of the period, that is the work that embodies, more perfectly than any other,

the classical situation that emerged around 1900." 4 Now what is classic in that situation is not

only the discovery of the theory of partial equilibria. Nor is it the individual moments as separate

parts of the investigation which eventually form together a new system of economic thought. The

same goes for the notion of the demand's elasticity, the introduction of the "short term" and

"long.term" factors in economic analysis, the definition of a situation of perfect competition, the

concept of an enterprise's "special market," and many other things such as Jevons' marginal

utility, Walras' general equilibrium, von Thuenen's principle of substitution, Cournot's demand

curves and Dupuit's consumers' rent, which he borrowed from others but which seemed newbecause he rearranged them in his own way. In what may be the most beautiful of hisEssays in

Biography - the one devoted to Marshall - Keynes wrote something regarding not just the

personality dealt with, but the author as well: "But it was an essential truth to which he held

firmly, that those individuals who are endowed with a special genius for the subject and have a

powerful economic intuition will often be more right in their conclusions and implicit

presuppositions than in their explanations and explicit statements. That is to say, their intuitions

will be in advance of their analysis and terminology .5

The classic situation of England at the end of the century is in the way in which intuitions before

analysis and concepts before words are directly connected with their class basis: the datum, themoment and the' level of the class-struggle. What is classic for us is the model of an historical

condition in which the struggle is connected to politics, theory, and organization. England in 1889

is not an isolated and unexpected thunderbolt. It comes about after at least two decades of

continuous individual clashes which, although backward, were very conscious, active, and

increasingly more unionized. They are waged by miners, railroad, maritime, gas, textile, and steel

workers. Except for 1893, after 1880 real wages rise steadily, the price-curve falls, employment is

generally stable and there is increasing unionization. The situation of the English working-class

must not be sought in studies such as Charles Booth's then famous Life and Labor of the People

of London which denounce the workers' misery, but follow rather than anticipate or provoke the

longshoremen's strike. Cole has written: "The appeals that had roused the workers in the 'thirtiesand 'forties would have made no impression on their successors in the latter part of the century.

Though there were still, even in 1900 many thousands of hopelessly exploited 'bottom dogs'...

these were not typical of the organized or organizable working class. In the great industries, the

workers had ceased to be a ragged and starving mob, easily roused, either by a Feargus O'Connor

or a James Rayner Stephens, or by someone of the many 'Messiahs' who sprang up in the early

years of the century."6 There were no more mass uprisings and sudden revolts produced by

desperation and hunger: the strikes were ordered, prepared, expected, directed, and organized. In


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order to obtain results, socialist propaganda itself had to deal with reason and no longer rouse the

instincts. If "O'Connor had been hot as hell; Sidney Webb was always as cool as a cucumber." 7

In 1889 the longshoremen asked for a wage of six pence per hour, overtime, abolition of sub-

contracts and piece-work, and a minimum work-period of four hours. They were guided by Ben

Tillet - a London dock-worker - along with Tom Mann and John Burns - both mechanics. They

were all exponents of the "new unionism which fought against specialized unions, and societiesof mutual assistance, while seeking a mass organization of the whole working-class by waging a

struggle based on class-solidarity for a series of objectives able to challenge the capitalist system.

The victory of the dock-workers was the victory of the new union. The nineties saw few very

advanced struggles: Lancashire cotton-spinners against wage reductions, 400,000 miners against

the flexible rate with a guaranteed minimumn wage, railroad workers against the schedule, and

mechanics for a 48 hour week. The organization of unskilled workers took place and developed

among the skeptical comments of the old leaders. Longshoremen gas workers and miners built

unions without regard to skills. A new epoch was coming about in the already historical relation

between workers and labor Here it is not the relation between labor and capital that marks a step

forward. Rather, on the political level, this relation stagnates while theoretically failing to find anew consciousness to express it after having elaborated it. Similarly, the good Fabians cannot be

claimed to be the virtuous interpreters of the epoch. Here, before dealing with a frontal attack on

the capitalist system, we must deal with the internal composition of the working-class. Such will

almost always be the case in England There we will find no 1strategies for overthrowing the

existing power' models of alternative political organization, or non-utopian developments' of

labor thought. Above all, from the capitalist viewpoint, that is not the source of the world-side

breath of fresh air of great initiatives. At the state level, the political moment has no margin of

autonomy in imposing its own pattern on social relations. As V.L. Allen would say, the

government is never more than a conciliator and an arbitrator. From the Victorian Conciliation

Act of 1896, to the Prices and Incomes Act seventy years later (that Wilson's crew had to handlethrough formal decisions) there is a typically English history of no capitalist policy towards labor'

Thus the political level has not been independent of capital's immediate needs - the only path

which has hitherto led to a strategic defeat of the workers. Hence, the dynamic supporting role of

the real long-range management of power is taken over by scientific elaboration by the

theoretical consciousness of the labor problem translated in terms of bourgeois conceptualization.

The autonomy of politics from capitalist development appears here as the autonomy of science:

science not as technology but as theory, not as an analysis of labor, but as capital's economy. We

must not seek in the highest points of economic thought a direct treatment of the labor struggles:

the higher the level of elaboration, the more abstract is the movement of categories and the more

difficult it becomes to recognize the presence of struggles in this thought. This is not because suchthought is removed from reality, but because it is close to it in a complex way It does not

passively reflect class-relations, but serves it to us well-spiced and elaborated in a diet of tasty

concepts. We must learn to read the scientific language of capital beyond these Concepts, beyond

the logic of the discipline: between the lines of "their" treatises systematizing "their" knowledge.

We must not grant what they say. The cultural hieroglyphics must be deciphered: the scientific

jargon must be translated in our illustrious class dialect. In regard to the great scientific discovery

by the capitalist, we must follow its attitude towards reality: we must not reflect what is, but


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elaborate in order to understand what really is.

In his inaugural address in Cambridge in 1885, Marshall said: "Among the bad results of the

narrowness of the work of English economists early in the nineteenth century perhaps the most

unfortunate was the opportunity which it gave to socialists to quote and misapply economic

dogma-" 8 As can be seen from his 1919 "Preface" to Industry and Trade, socialists' works bothrepulsed and attracted him because they seemed to have no contact with reality. He noticed

"admirable developments in the working-class capabilities" and recalled how some ten years

earlier he believed that so-called "socialist" proposals were the most important things worth

studying. Those were the years between 1885 and 1900, when he used to spend his weekends with

working-class leaders such as Thomas Burt, Ben Tillet, Tom Mann and other new unionists: the

victorious dock-worker leaders of 1889. It was the year when after twenty years of work, he

finished what Keynes has called a "universe of knowledge:" his Principles of Economics. As with

every classical product of economic thought, here everything that happens within the working-

class appears as happening within capital. From his viewpoint, bourgeois science rightly refuses

to grant workers, and therefore the labor struggles, any autonomy at all. History is always thehistory of capital. As labor or as wages, as a complex living machinery or as simple natural

energy, as a function of the system or as a contradiction of production, the working-class always

plays a secondary role. It does not enjoy its own light and reflects the movement of the capitalist

cycle. This is exactly opposite the truth from our viewpoint where every discovery of an objective

social science can and must be translated in the language of the struggles. The most abstract

theoretical problem' will have the most concrete class meaning. In September 1862, after having

sent to the British Association his "Notice of a General Mathematical Theory of Political

Economy" with the first outline of the concept of marginal utility, Jevons wrote his brother: "I am

very curious, indeed, to know what effect my theory will have both upon my friends and the

world in general. I shall watch it like an artilleryman watches the flight of a shell or shot to seewhether its effects equal his intentions."9 If the forebodings are those of Jevons' Theory of 1871.

the effects are to be found in Marshall'sPrinciples. It is our problem to follow the flight of this

shell during this period in the history of class struggle.

Unless we are mistaken, this should be that historical event to be unravelled. This is precisely the

classical level of the question concerning the relationship between struggles and science: workers'

struggles and the science of capital. Such a relationship will subsequently have a long history yet

to be concluded. If we have grasped it correctly, in the underground of that epoch there should be

a strong current that brings this relationship to a preliminary formalization as a model. We must

dig in order to find. The way in which the problem is posed offers a methodological indicationalso valuable in other investigations. As Keynes put it, "Jevons saw the kettle boil and cried out

with the delighted voice of a child; Marshall too had seen the kettle boil and sat down silently to

build an empire."10

The Historical Social Democracy


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In his Demokratie und Kaisertum of 1900 Friedrich Naumann defined the Bismarckian Empire as

a labor republic.The social monarchy of the two Wilhelms deserves this paradoxical label. In the

same way that the profoundly German tradition of theMachstaathas turned out to be the most

fragile among all political institutions of modern capital, the bete noirof the reactionary Junkers

turns out to be the road most open to the development of a certain type of democratic labor

movements. Without Bismarck there may never have been German social-democracy in itsclassical form: "without Mohammed Charlemagne would have been inconceivable." On the other

hand from his uncomfortable perspective of agrarian socialism, Rudolf Meyer was correct in

arguing that without social democracy German industry would not have been developed. All of

these logical passages are full of historical meaning. The theme of the political organisation of

the working-class finds in the German speaking middle-Europe its proper domain for a

finally successful experiment. It is worth measuring the relation between struggle and

organization here - if for no other reason, to catch the point of departure of a long-spanning arc.

Today this arc must not be gradually re-threatened in practice. It must only be caught by the

liquidating glance of labor theory which, in its present strategic indications, goes well beyond

what there was then and after. Yet we must immediately add that, at least in Germany, nothing isequal in importance to the clashing force of the political model of classical social-democracy,

from the Lassallean Offenes Antwortschreihen of 1863 to 1913 - a year of struggles with

5,672,034 working days lost in strikes. In front of this first historical form of the political party of

the working-class, all other organizational experiences have been forced to appear as answers,

alternatives, or as a kind of reversed image of what was not wanted: a negative repetition of what

was considered a bad passivity At least in Europe, 19th century revolutionary syndicalism, the

historical Luxemburgian left, the various council experiments of Bavaria and Piedmont,and the

very first minority groups ever(the just-born communist parties) were essentially answers to the

question of the party that social-democracy posed to the labor vanguard. The Bolshevik model

does not escape this organizational anti - social -democrat' determination. It explodes in Lenin'shead as soon as he, outside of Russia, comes into contact with the experiences of the European

labour movement. Thus, Germany presents the classical political terrain of the labor struggle

which becomes a reference point for every elaboration of the problem of organization. Strangely

enough, by adapting the young Marx to capital's old age, the working class party does not up the

heir of philosophy, but of classical German social-democracy.

As every other fact, this one too has another historiographic side. The German labor movement,

along with the whole class-struggle in Germany seems to have only a political history: a mere

development of the organisational level. It always seems to be a matter of leadership: a history of

party congresses. From Mehring on, Marxist historiography has been an easy victim of this falseoptics. In no country outside of Germany is the level of the struggles so difficult to reach. This is

not because the struggles are few, but because they are not too visible. Submerged as they are in

their immediate organizational consequences, they merely reach the surface. It is not accidental

that the union grew in this context with so much difficulty, competing and often struggling with

the party. Strangely enough, the union chronologically followed the development of the party. It

is not accidental that the average militant intellectual is familiar with the politically insipid name

of both Liebknechts, while he may never have heard of a Karl Legien. For 30 years up to his


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death in 1921, this "German Samuel Gompers" - as Perlman used to call him - controls the union,

and therefore its struggles: the labor strikes. Now, before the Junker von Puttkamer began to

apply with the sure hand of a policeman the Bismarckian laws against them, the socialists had

had enough time to split. Eisenachian ideologists a la Bebel and the followers of von Schweitzer,

that PrussianRealpolitikerwho was both a worker and a baron, had split, but they had also

managed to become reunited by singing in chorus the verses of that Gotha program which whoknows what destiny it might have had if it had not fallen under the rapacious claws of the old

man in London. This was a time of unusually violent struggles which were close to uprisings, but

almost always ended in defeat. The strikes were local, isolated, badly organized, misdirected, and

succeeded only in unifying the owners. Yet, theErwachungstreiks of late 1860s had their effect:

between 1871 and 1872 the struggles grew from the steel-workers of Chemnitz to Cramer-Klett

mechanics in Nuremburg and the 16,000 miners of the Ruhr who took to the streets with the cry:

eight hours of work and a 25% rise in wages. In 1873 a violent crisis hit the German economy,

and the workers ferociously defended themselves against unemployment and wage reductions

with "increasing lawlessness and lack of discipline" - as it is phrased in a law introduced in the

Reichstag. Theodor York, the president of the wood workers, took the opportunity to launch theanti-local unionist idea of centralizing organization. But we are in Germany: the centralization

sought in unions is to be found at the political level. The Gotha congress claimed that it was the

workers' duty to keep away union politics, but it held that it was also their duty to join the Party,

because only this could improve the workers' political and economic conditions. Gradilone has

rightly concluded that "the date 1875 remains a landmark not only because it marked the birth of

the first European party of the working class, but also because it indirectly influenced the

developmentof similar parties in the continent... all of them more or less having come into being

through the direct or indirect influence of the German party." We must give credit to social-

democracy for having objectively derived the political form of the party from the content of the

struggles, for having raised the relation between struggle and organization to the level ofgovernmental policy, and, therefore, for having used the struggles to grow as an alternative

power: a negative institutional power provisionally opposed to the government while waiting to

take state power. Paradoxically enough, it was Lenin who gave social-democracy a theory of the

party. Before him there was only a daily political practice. Only within the Bolshevik group, in

theIskra office, can we find a principled systematization of the function of the historical party of

the working class. Even the most classic forms of social-democracy only indicate the party's

strategic program and tactical path, but not the dynamic laws of its apparatus. What was not

posed was the altogether Leninist question: "what type of organization do we need?" By contra-

posing the two types of organization, Lenin elaborated the theory of both. He needed to do this

because his reasoning was entirely political. He did not (nor did he want to) start from struggles.His logic was based on a concept of political rationality absolutely independent of everything. It

was even independent of class-interest which, if anything, was common to both. His party was not

the anti-state: even before taking power, it was the only true state of the true society. We must not

look for the labor struggle before Lenin as a cause of his theory of the party. This does not

diminish, rather it enlarges, the importance of its experience. Although not triggered by the labor

struggle, Lenin completely grasped the laws of its political action. Thus, the classical bourgeois

notion of the autonomy of politics is reconstituted from labor's viewpoint. Within this frame of


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reference, the historical destiny of social-democracy is quite different. Its party form has invented

nothing: in its daily practice it has only reflected a very high theoretical level of labor's attack on

the system. Instead, behind German social-democracy, English economics, and American

capitalist initiative, there is the beginning of a long typology which, in coming closer to our own

days, increasingly specifies the character of the clash between labor's wages and capital's profit.

Not accidentally, the capitalist labor history begins there. This can be now demonstrated with theongoing struggles.

Let us open the third volume of Kuczynski's monumental workGeschichte der Lage der Arbeiter

in Deutschland von 1789 bis zur Gegenwart(the first part of a work followed by a second part on

working conditions in England, the U.S., and France). Divested of its crypto-Marxist

conceptualization and terminology, this work is a mine of class news. 1889 is the key year. It is

the year of the birth of the Second International: that legitimate daughter of German capital and

social-democracy. Both sides of the English Channel were on strike: English dock workers, and

German miners. After the struggle of Berlin's 25,000 masons and carpenters on the platform

"from ten to nine working hours, from 50 to 60 pfennigs in wages," there was an explosion of thathistorical vanguard which the miners have always been: 13,000 in the Saar, 10,000 in Saxony,

18,000 in Silesia, 90,000 in Westphalia. When they all stopped the army was sent in against them

and there were five workers dead, nine wounded. Engels and Luxemburg wrote about it, the

Reichstag was flooded with the problem, and the leaders of the movement, Schroeder, Bunte and

Spiegel, even went up to the Kaiser. Quick as a thunderbolt, the consequences came the following

year, 1890. February 20th, the social-democrat candidates picked up a million and a half votes,

20% of the total, 660,000 more than they had received in 1887. March 20th, Bismarck was out.

The first of October, the exceptional laws against the socialists were abolished. In Mehring's

words, it was the beginning of a new period in the history of the German Reich and in the history

of German social-democracy. Today it is necessary to introduce this new form of historicalperiodization in our theoretical elaboration, and find new dates as the point of departure of the

social answer either of large collective institutions or of great individual thought. According to

Walter Galenson, between 1890 and 1913 in Germany the intermingling of the history of the

party and the history of struggles brings to a classical conclusion the premises posed by earlier

experiences. From November 1890 to September 1891, there were some 30 strikes in which

40,000 workers participated: first of all there were the printers - the "Englishmen" of the German

labor movement with their legal successes concerning the time-schedule. Between 1892 and

1894, there were 320 small, diffused and short strikes involving 20,000 workers. In 1895, and

most of all in 1896, there was another great wave in Berlin, in the Saar, and in the Ruhr. The

percentage of the conflicts with outcomes favorable for the workers went from 58.5% to 74.7%.There was an air of labor victory. The dock workers' strike in Hamburg in 1896 brought back the

idea of the anti-strike law. We come to theZuchthaus Vorlage of 1899, fallen through

parliamentary means. The 1903 Crimmitschau strike, however, had a different outcome. For five

months, 8,000 textile workers were on strike for higher wages. The result was a strong association

of the owners. This was the beginning of that long process which immediately after World War I

resulted in the massive anti-worker and therefore counter-revolutionary reality of the

Vereinigung der deutschen Arbeitgeberverbande. The years between 1903 and 1907 saw an


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intensity of the struggle equal to its quantitative extension: the high point was in 1905 when the

striking workers reached half million and there were 7,362,802 work days lost. In 1910 there were

still 370,000 striking workers and 9,000,000 workdays lost. This was roughly how it remained up

to 1913. This explains what surprises superficial contemporary German historians such as

Vermeil: from 1890 to 1912 social-democrat votes rose from 1,427,000 to 4,250,000 and the seats

from 35 to 110. According to Zwing, from 1891 to 1913 there was a decrease of federations from63 to 49, while there was an explosion of their membership from 277,659 to 2,573,718. After the

guerrilla-warfare, with the Mannheim agreement, peace and harmony descended between party

and union. This is a story full of contradictory lights - flares that light up and die out - allowing

the guiding forces of the process to come into view, along with the unavoidable negative

outcome. People have seen within the Second International only what they have wanted to see. It

is as if all had been settled in the theoretical debate, everything written inNeue Zeit, everything

said in the "Bernstein-Debatte," and there was nothing left to say after the

Zusammenbruchstheorie discussions between belligerent intellectuals. Classical German social-

democracy has been turned into an historical episode of the theory of the labor movement. Yet

the true theory - the high science - was not in the socialist camp but outside and against it. Andthis altogether theoretical science - this scientific theory - had as its content, object, and problem

the fact of politics. The new theory of a new politics suddenly arose both in the great bourgeois

thought and in the subversive labor praxis. Lenin was closer to Max Weber's "Politik als Beruf'

than to the German labor struggles upon which was based - as a colossus standing on clay -

classical social-democracy.

During the Weimar period, when he still spoke to party cadres of Berlin's Volkshochschule, the

social-democrat Theodor Geiger used to write: "We call 'die Masse' that social group with a

revolutionary and destructive goal." A year earlier, in unveiling the essence of the "social-

democratic tactic" according to which the proletariat must compromise with the bourgeoisie,Lukacs had correctly seen that, since the true revolution still remains far away and its

preconditions do not exist yet: "the more the subjective and objective preconditions of social

revolution are present, the more 'purely' will the proletariat be able to fulfill its class aims. So the

reverse of practical compromise is often great radicalism -absolute 'purity' in principle in relation

to the 'ultimate goal'." 11 This is the true, classical and historical social-democracy. It is not true

that there is where the revolutionary goal was abandoned. Here we confuse it with some formula

of Bernsteinian revisionism. The beauty of that social-democracy was precisely its tactically

holding together of the two sides of the coin - both possible party politics: a daily practice of

Menshevik actions and an ideology of pure subversive principles. This is why we claim that,

historically, it is an unequalled organizational solution of the labor struggle on the political level.The Bolshevik model and the ensuing communist movement does not go as far or, better, it ends

up with something qualitatively different. Let-us explain this in other words. During this period,

the classical form of the social-democratic party in Germany passively reflected a level of labor

spontaneity that carried within itself i.e., in its struggles, the ambiguity, the contradiction, and the

duplicity of the demand for better capitalist working conditions, and the "socialist" refusal. The

situation was not so backward as to prevent cyclic explosions of economic struggles, nor was it so

advanced as to rule out alternative proposals for the formal management of power. It remains a


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fact that, from the very beginning, the contact between the labor struggles and the social-

democratic party was so direct and the relation so close as to prevent even a mediation at the

union level. Trade-unionism was altogether absent from the German labor tradition. Thus, the

whole discussion concerning political perspective reveals an amazing absence of conceptual

mediations, surprises and attacks on the adversary's camp. This organizational miracle of German

social-democracy had as its other side an average level of intellectual mediocrity, a scientificapproximation and theoretical misery, which could only produce the failure that they did: that

scholastic correction of Marxist truth which from Lenin on we still have to waste time combating.

In the meantime capital's high science was growing on its own, unchallenged, and without rival.

Here is the true illusion of which the tactical social-democracy horizon is always a prisoner: a

kind of optimistic vision of the historical process which moves forward through its own gradual

unfolding rather than through a violent clash with the opposite side. Thus, it ultimately finds a

reassuring and comfortable judgment from a just and good God. As an example of the high

science of capital, Max Weber subsequently posed correctly the alternative question: "(a) whether

the intrinsic value of ethical conduct -the 'pure will' or the 'conscience' as it used to be called - is

sufficient for its justification, following the maxim of the Christian moralists: 'The Christian actsrightly and leaves the consequences of his actions to God;' or (b) whether the responsibility for

the predictable consequences of the action is to be taken into consideration."12 This is the way in

which the antithesis between Gesinnungethikand Verantwortungsethik was later posed in the

essay "The Meaning of 'Ethical Neutrality' in Sociology and Economics:" "All radical

revolutionary political attitudes, particularly revolutionary 'syndicalism,' have their point of

departure in the first postulate; all Realpolitik in the latter." But barely a year later, in his lecture

on "Politics as a Vocation," he was to say that the two ethics are not absolutely anti-ethical, but

that they complement each other. In fact, "only in unison" do they "constitute a genuine man - a

man who can have the 'calling for politics'." 13 The politician, i.e., the one who holds "in one's

hands a nerve fiber of historically important events," must possess three highly decisive qualities:passion "in the sense of matter-of factness, of passionate devotion to a 'cause';" responsibility in

relation to this cause as "the guiding star of action;" and far-sightedness as "his ability to let

realities work upon him with inner concentration and calmness. Hence his distance to things and

men." 14 It is on this basis that, according to Gerhard Maser, Weber's sociology of power

becomes a sociology of might. To the extent that the aspiration to power is the indispensable tool

for political work, the instinct of power (Machtinstinkt) is actually a normal quality of the

politician. In the meetings of the Heidelberg workers' and soldiers' councils in which Weber

participated in 1918, he could well have proposed and elaborated the proletarian laws of power

politics. "The old problematic dealing with the best possible form of government, he would have

dismissed as irrelevant. The struggle among classes and individuals for power or dominationseemed to him to be the essence, if one chooses, the constant datum of politics." No, we are not

talking about Lenin, but still of Max Weber, "Machiavelli's heir... and Nietzsche's contemporary"

-- as Raymond Aron has correctly defined him precisely in the quoted context. But Weber's

politician is Lenin. Isn't the burning passion and the cold far-sightedness to be found in that

proper mixture of blood and judgment that Lukacs attributes to his Lenin? 15

And doesn't the sense of responsibility coincide with Lenin's constant preparedness? The truth is


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that the Weberian concept of purely and entirely political activity could have been completely

applied only from the labor viewpoint. What this means is never to remain passive victims even

of the highest labor spontaneity, as used to be the case in the serious opportunism of classical

social-democracy. Rather, it means to actively mediate the concrete situation's complexity in its

entirety. In such a situation the labor struggle is never the sole determinant, but is always

interconnected with capital's political answer, with the latest results of bourgeois science and withthe levels attained by the labor movement's organizations. In this sense the labor struggle is

behind social-democracy much more than Leninism. Yet, Leninism is politically ahead of both

since it foresees, rather prescribes, that their historical nexus - the relation between struggles and

social-democracy - is the practical premise for a workers' defeat. It can foresee and prescribe

because it knows and applies the scanty laws of political action without the illusions of moral

ideals. Lenin had not read Weber's 1895Freiburg Address. Yet he acted as ifhe knew and

interpreted those words in his daily praxis: "For the dream of peace and human happiness on top

of the door of the unknown future is written: 'leave all hope'." This is Lenin's greatness. Even

when he was not in direct contact with the great bourgeois thought, he was able to deal with it

since he directly derived it from things: he recognized it in its objective functioning. He hadunderstood very early what today we are forced to relearn among immense difficulties: that

maxim in Weber's Address which we should courageously accept as a party program: "Our

descendants will hold us responsible in front of history not for the type of economic organization

which we will leave them in inheritance but, rather, for the space for movement which we wil

have conquered and passed on."

Class Struggles in the United States

Let us begin with a working hypothesis already loaded with heavy political assumptions: thelabor struggle has attained the highest absolute level between 1933 and 1947 in the U.S. There

have been advanced, successful, and mass labor struggles - and simple contractual struggles:

consider any revolutionary experience of the old Europe, confront it with this particular cycle of

American labor struggles, and we will discover our limitations and our defeats. At best, we will

realize our subjective backwardness and, worst, our absurd pretense of being the vanguard

without a movement, generals without an army, priests of subversion without any political

knowledge. Today we must reverse the claim of those who see the European workers dragging

behind more backward situations which, however, are more revolutionary. If, within the class

struggle, victory is measured by what and how much has been gained, then the European workers

find before them, as the most advanced model of behavior for their present needs, the way ofwinning, or the way of defeating the adversary, adopted by American workers in the 1930s.

There had been rich struggling premises. A wave had developed during the war years, and, in its

own way, had transformed the national war not into a civil war, but into a class struggle. Because

of lack of scientific courage, or fear of knowing the real state of affairs, the American workers'

behavior during the two wars is a chapter of contemporary history yet to be written. To say that

the workers profit by the war is a bitter truth which one would willingly erase from history. The


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labor struggle within the capitalist war is a great political fact of our epoch; it is not by accident,

we catch it free from Europe in the American heart of the international capitalist system. In 1914

and 1915 the number of strikes was 1204 and 1593; in 1916 the number jumps to 3789, and in

1917 to 4450, with 1,600,000 and 1,230,000 striking workers respectively Aside from the

fabulous year of 1937, we have to go to 1941 to find once again 4288 strikes in one year,

involving 2,360,000 workers, or 8.4% of the employed work-force, exactly as in 1916: apercentage never reached until 1945 - if we exclude the other fabulous year 1919. In the years

1943, 1944, and 1945 there is an impressive growth: the number of strikes goes from 3752 to

4956 to 4750; the struggling workers from ,980,000 to 2,120,000 to 3,470,000. The intensity of

the labor struggle during the war is topped only in one instance: in the immediate post-war

period, during the first conversion of war industries into peace and civil welfare industries. It

would seem that the workers should abstain from creating difficulty in such a human endeavor.

Let us examine this. In 1946 there were 4985 strikes involving 4,600,000 workers out of work,

16.5% of the entire employed work-force. In 1919 there were 3630 strikes, with 4,160,000

strikers, or 20.2% of all the workers employed at the time. 16 From the workers' viewpoint, the

war was a great occasion for obtaining much, while peace was a great occasion for asking formore, Thus, the National War Labor Board, new-dealer before the New Deal, could find no better

way to squash labor conflicts than to let the workers win. Right to organize, collective bargaining

through union representation, union-shop and open-shop contracts, equal pay for women,

minimum wages: these are the conquests of the first war-period. Having strengthened the

organization by exploiting the class adversary's national needs (in 1918 unions had more than 4

million members), in the post-war period the clash shifted to wages. To the revolutionary

militant, 1919 means the civil war in Bolshevik Russia, the Soviet Bavarian Republic, the 3rd

International and Bela Kun in the same way that to the Italian militant it means the Turin of

Ordine Nuovo, and the Councils before the factories' occupation. Seattle is a name altogether

unknown. Its shipbuilders, guided by James A. Duncan, who dragged 60,000 workers into ageneral strike for five days, are never mentioned. Yet that was a key year for the class struggle in

America which, in terms of the positive destiny of world revolution, was probably more

important than all the rest of "Euro-asiatic" events put together. There was the strike of Boston

policemen, organized in the unionism of the Boston Social Club which wanted to affiliate with

the AFL - things reminiscent of the French May, although they been a little more serious since

they took place half a century earlier and did not include in their programs "foot-ball aux foot-

balleurs." But there were also strikes of mechanics and railroad workers, textile workers and

longshoremen: from the food industries to the clothing industries. And it came down to a decisive

clash on the level of production of material basic to every other type of production: steel and coal.

350,000 steel workers demanded a collective contract with a wage increase and an eight-hourwork day. The United States Steel Corporation answered that it had no intention of doing

business with them. The days of the wartime New Deal were over. All authority and local

military forces, both state and federal, were on the side of the owners. An anti-worker witch-hunt,

the isolation of their organization in the public opinion, about 20 deaths, and they were defeated.

Foster R. Dulles has written that if the steel workers had won, the entire history of the labor

movement during the following decade would have followed a completely different course. As

the steel workers retreated, 425,000 miners entered the field. Here the labor organization was


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better, and therefore the demands were higher: wage increases of 60%, and a 36-hour work week.

They gained half of what they asked in wages, but no reduction in hours. Wilson, the idealist and

neurotic 28th U.S. president obtained a court injunction to halt the strike. John L. Lewis, president

of the United Mine Workers soon to be famous for other deeds, repeated the injunction from the

level of the labor organization. The miners listened to neither of the two presidents and continued

the struggle until they obtained whatever they could under those conditions. One could read in thenewspapers of the period: "No organized minority has the right of throwing the country into

chaos... A labor autocracy is as dangerous as a capitalist autocracy." These were the

methodological rules that capital was beginning to derive from the hard clash with the workers:

the social philosophy which was to triumph in the following happy decade. The American 20s are

an era of social peace, great prosperity, "the age of wonderful idiocies," welfare capitalism, and

high wages, gained not through struggles, nor through capital's political initiative, but given as if

by chance by the individual capitalist's economic choice. For the first time in history "golden

chains" came into being, the tax of unionization falls frighteningly among the workers, a new

form of owner-controlled union comes into being, the open shop wins, while the scientific

organization of labor proceeds with giant steps. It is said that the great crash came suddenly toawaken everyone from the "American dream." One of the reasons why capital did not understand

that it was stepping on the edge of the abyss was this amazing silence on the part of the laboring

masses which followed the defeat of 400,000 railroad workers in 1922 and lasted even beyond

1929. Labor struggles are an irreplaceable instrument of self-consciousness for capital: without

them it does not recognize its own adversary. Consequently, it does not know itself. And when the

contradiction explodes among the parts altogether internal to the mechanism of capitalist

development, again the workers do not begin to actively struggle, neither to accelerate the crisis,

nor to somehow resolve it.

They know that there is nothing to gain as a particular class if the general development hasnothing more to grant. Obviously, the workers did not want the crisis. Less obvious, and actually

somewhat scandalous, is to claim that the crisis was not the product of labor struggles but of

labor passivity: of the massive refusal to go out on strike, with demands, propositions, struggle

and organization. We must be careful: we do not mean that the cause ofthatcrisis is to be located

in labor's attitude towards capital. This attitude was the only one which could have revealed the

existence of the crisis: the only one which, once expressed in struggles, could have allowed the

possibility of foreseeing it. On the other hand, it is easy to understand the flattening out of the

strike-curve in the decade of great buys at street corners. But why was there a labor passivity in

the heart of the crisis? Why was there no attempt to seek a revolutionary solution in an

objectively revolutionary situation which could hardly have been more so? Why was there no1917 in 1929? Workers make no demands and do not try to obtain them through struggles only in

two cases: when they obtain without asking, and when they know that they have nothing to gain.

Thus, the absence of great struggles from 1922 to 1933 has two different causes in the periods

between 1922 and 1929, and between 1929 and 1933. In the first period the objective margins of

capitalist profit spontaneously overflow to the workers. During the second period there are no

margins for either of the two parts: participation of labor's wages to capital's profit is unthinkable.

The very boundaries between classes disappear: there is only one crisis for all. Why bother to


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struggle when it is impossible to win concessions? In order to take power? We must never confuse

the two. The American working class is not the Russian Bolshevik party. We must stick to the

facts even when they arc problematic. When Roosevelt tried to deal with the crisis, the American

workers, again lined in battle formation, classically summarized the immediate precedents of

their political history: they struggled aggressively during the war and they won, they defended

themselves violently after the war and were defeated, they benefited without scruples from the"golden glitter" of the happy decade, and they reacted neither in their own defense, nor against

their adversary during the crisis. It seems like an abstract ballet, lacking any meaningful content.

But like the self-enclosed form of a mathematical formula, the logic of these movements is

impeccable. Today the American workers are the hidden face of the international working class.

To decipher the face of this sphinx which contemporary history places in front of us, we must

first undertake a complete examination of labor around the planet. The American night seems

dark because we see the day with our eyes closed.

Paragraph 7a of the National Industrial Recovery Act, with the right for workers "to organize and

bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing" and with an injunction toowners forbidding them any "interference, restraint, or coercion" 17 with minimum wages and

maximum allowed working time, was approved in June 1933 along wth the rest of the law. In the

second half of that year the number of strikes was equal to all those of the previous year: the

number of striking workers was three and a half times as many as in all of 1932. In 1934 there

were 1856 strikes with 1,500,000 workers involved: more than 7% of all those employed. Thus,

the number of conflicts was not high, although they involved the big industries: the steel workers,

the automobile workers, the West Coast longshoremen, the Northwestern wood workers, and first

in line with the loudest voice, almost 500,000 textile workers with demands for a thirty hour work

week, a thirteen-dollar minimum wage, the solution of the "strech-out" - as "speed-up" was called

in the textile industry -and the recognition of the United Textile Workers. When, as had alreadyhappened with the Clayton Act of 1914 and the Norris-LaGuardia law of 1923, paragraph 7a fell

under the combined reaction of the individual capitalist and the still bourgeois judiciary branch of

government, the workers had already used it for all it was worth: to create a space for movement

to the new demands raised now to a level of organization. The password "to organize the

disorganized," i.e., to enter unions in the big mass-production industries, became possible only

when the collective capitalist consciousness opened the factory to a modern labor power which

would counter-balance the backward and antiquated owners' power. 1935 saw the birth and the

success of both the Wagner Act and the CIO. Again, we have more evidence that between

capital's political initiative and the workers' advanced organization there is an inextricable knot

which cannot be untied even if we wanted to. A National Labor Relations Board oversees thatowners do not employ "unfair labor practices," and that they do not oppose collective bargaining

with unfair procedures, issues "cease and desist" orders only to the industrial side, never to labor's

side, abolishes the owner's union, removes its restriction to crafts, and for the first time gives it to

common workers. Thus, it is not an organ of political mediation between two equally contraposed

parts: Franklin Delano is not Theodore Roosevelt. It is an administrative organ with judiciary

functions: a kind of injunction exactly contrary to everything that came before it in the American

tradition - an injunction of capital to the capitalists to leave space for the autonomy of labor


15/34

organizations. Furthermore, within labor there is a choice in favor of new sectors of production,

the identification of the figure of the new mass worker in the steel, automobile, rubber, and radio

industries. This explains why, although the CIO was only two years old while the AFL had been

around for half a century, by the end of 1937 the former had already more members than the

latter, and that the "appropriate bargaining units" established in 1935 were run according to

majority rule in favor of the new industrial unionism. If capital's advanced choices favored themost advanced labor organization, these, in turn, supported capital so that the new choices won

over old resistances. The law of the Fair Labor Standards - the logical follow-up to the National

Labor Relations Act - dates back to 1838. It set a minimum wage of 25 cents per hour, to go up to

40 cents after seven years, a maximum work week of 44 hours before the end of 1939, 42 hours

before the end of 1941, and 40 hours afterwards. But 1937 was needed between the constitutional

recognition of the Wagner Act and its logical follow-up. That year saw the highest number of

strikes ever (4740), a movement to extend unionism from areas of large concentration to vital

knots of production with new forms of struggle and instruments of pressure of hitherto unknown

efficacy. It began by founding the Steel Workers' Organizing Committee, and following the

success of this organizational move Big Steel, the impenetrable fortress of U.S. Steel, was forcedto surrender to wage increases of 10%, an eight.hour work day, and a forty-hour work week. Then

came Little Steel: 75,000 workers were forced to carry out a very hard struggle against the

smaller steel-producing companies. There was the "Memorial Day Massacre" in Chicago, and

therefore a temporary labor defeat which only four years later was mended by the intervention of

the political ally maneuvering the levers of government. But the high point of the clash took place

in the automobile industry between the country's most powerful union (UAW), and capital's

strongest corporations (Ford, GM, and Chrysler). The "sit-down strike" came into being and for

44 days production at General Motors was blocked in Flint, Cleveland, and Detroit. There was a

court injunction to evacuate the factories, but it was ignored. There was an attempt to storm the

factories by the police, but it was pushed back. "Solidarity forever" was the slogan that unitedworkers inside and the population outside. Then came labor's victory: collective bargaining with

the UAW as a recognized counterpart. This American form of factory Occupation exploded, and

soon Chrysler too had to give in. Only Ford would resist four more years before its first collective

contract, but it would have to yield more: the infamous closed shop. The quantitative extension of

strikes grew from 1937 to involve rubber, glass, textile, optical and electrical workers. Roosevelt

and his egg-heads followed worried and utilized the movement in their battle within capital. The

1938 law concerning "fair working conditions" was an advanced political answer which only

those struggles could have obtained. The labor struggle kept increasingly turning the public hand

in its favor as soon as it understood that this hand was forced to give in because of its own needs.

We come to the war with a relation of forces violently shifted in favor of labor. What had neverhappened before became possible: the solution of the crisis gave power to the workers by taking it

away from the capitalists. The move that followed was also logical and coherent. It was no longer

the old socialist call for struggle against the war, but the most modern and subversive class-

vindication conceivable: labor participation in war profits. In 1941, even before Pearl Harbor, the

struggle centered once again around wages by automobile workers, shipbuilders, teamsters,

construction workers, textile workers, and that vital point of war production which were the

"captive mines" tied to the steel industry, and still having Lewis at the head of 250,000 men. In a


16/34

year the average wage jumped up 20%. During WW11 the American miners wrote a special

chapter in the history of the class struggle which should be carefully studied. The War Labor

Board was to no avail, and Roosevelt himself had to put on the hard mask of the workers' enemy

in dealing with them. In 1943 they added their massive organized power to the thousands of

spontaneous strikes that exploded all over the country against the government and without

unions. From here we have a growth of struggles that engulfed the last two years of the war andthe immediate post-war period. 1946 is again like 1919. There are almost 5,000 strikes, involving

almost 5,OOQ,000 workers: 16.5% of the employed with 120 million work days lost. Practically

every industry was involved in the labor conflict. The National Wage Stabilization Board could

not curb the movement. A labor demand took precedence over all the others: peace wages equal

to war wages. Here we find the slogans which were to reappear a quarter of a century later in the

streets of Europe: "no contract, no work5" "52 for 40," and an American form of labor control, "a

look at the books." The high points once again were in General Motors among the steel workers,

the miners, and, even more, the railroad workers, The increase in ~he cost of living, typical of

war-time, was followed by a mad chase of nominal wage which almost caught up with it. This

was the beginning of the modern history of the class-relation between wages and prices, theunfolding of that deadly disease which our capital has learned to live with and which, in the

diagnoses of the economist, is called the process of inflation stemming from the cost of labor.

This is the beginning of that dynamic of development as movement of struggles which will decide

the destiny of modern capital: who will have to run it, and who will be able to use it. 1947 came

in the U.S. under the sign of the "great labor fear" which had shaken the country the year before.

It is incredible, but the Taft-Hartley law ultimately proposed to return the capitalists' contractual

power on an equal footing with that of the workers. This says it all concerning what had happened

in the U.S. from 1933 on. The equation of the contractual ability of the two struggling classes -

that classic demand for equal rights usually put forth by the weaker force against the deciding

one-was advanced for the first time by the capitalists to be conquered or reconquered within theirstate. This is a revealing episode of a history which is still part of today, where it is not true that

one class always dominates and another one is always dominated, but where, from time to time,

in ever changing power relations, the power of one overcomes the power of the other. This can

take place independently of the institutional forms of power, and independently of the name

under which the formal structure of society appears to the outside (whether it be called

capitalistic or socialist) according to the ancient language dating back to the origins of our

science. This is an historically rich episode of a strong synthesis of fundamental facts of the past:

of decisive elements that the class-struggle had hitherto disorderedly accumulated. It is politically

charged with a future not yet even scratched by the attacks of a labor movement which has

succeeded in reaching that point, but has not been able to go beyond it. These 14 years between1933 and 1947 in the United States are an historical fact of capital which is at the same time an

action of labor politics. All that we had found separated in different periods and in different

countries before this epoch we find here once again unified in a unique and complex network of

facts and thoughts: the relation between struggles and capital's political initiative, between

struggles and science, between struggles and labor organization, i.e., the Progressive Era,

Marshall's Age, the epoch of social-democracy. Here they merge and recognize each other as

separate parts of one whole precisely during these years in the U.S. where we see the conclusion


17/34

of a classical phase of the class struggle which goes from after-Marx to before our actual

possibilities of movement. To depart from the labor struggles in order to grasp the various levels

of social development such as the state, science and organization, is something learned all of a

sudden in these events. Afterwards, the labor struggle will always add itself to these levels taken

together. This will be our real starting point both for analysis as well as class activity. But let us

elaborate in a more extended way these concepts whose obscurity is not just apparent.

Marx in Detroit

Actually, we have had capital's great initiative only once; not by accident it took place after the

greatest crisis of its system, within the most advanced labor struggles of its history. Maybe it is an

exaggeration to claim with Rexford G. Tugwell that on March 4,1933, the alternative was

between an orderly revolution, "a peaceful and rapid departure from past concepts,"'8 and a

violent revolution against the capitalist structure. It may be more accurate to claim that there was

only one very original obligatory road open which, compared to the miserable institutional eventsof contemporary society, appears today as a genuine "capitalist revolution." It is not a revolution

against capital's structures, but of these structures by a political initiative which possessed them -

or which has tried to possess them - from the vantage point of a new strategy. As H.G. Wells has

written of Roosevelt: "He is continuously revolutionary without ever provoking a stark

revolutionary crisis." 19 And C.G. Jung simply defined him as "a force."20 In his walk from Hyde

Park on the Hudson to the White House, the "happy warrior" used to choose the conditions of his

battle. That Roosevelt represented the interest of the most advanced capital in a given moment

needs no demonstration. The same goes for the claim that politics mediated through him opposite

forces within his class, between mad and moderate new dealers, while we could further develop

from the labor viewpoint the trajectory of this revolution of capital that grows from 1933 to 1938,and then begins to faIl. What must be critically examined, however, is the relation between

American class struggles and progressive economic neo-nationalism, along with the relation

between the historical isolationism of the American labor struggles and Keynesian national self-

sufficiency applied to the first New Deal. Generally speaking, we must realize that there the

revolutionary form of capitalist initiative has a working-class content and acquires such a form by

virtue of this content. Furthermore, through their struggles, the workers succeed in pitting capital

against the capitalists (the State formally belonging to all against the real interest of the few) and,

therefore, the labor conquest of their own organizational domain is at the expense of the class

adversary. All of these problems must be dealt with in an investigation that starts from history,

passes through theory, and arrives at politics. In fact, within the New Deal itself, a national laborpolicy towards labor came about rather late. Busy with the Emergency Banking Act, the

Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, during the famous One

Hundred Days the administration did not deal with either industry or labor. Paragraph 7 was, of

course, the spark. But it took the great struggles of 1933 and 1934 in Minneapolis, San Francisco,

Toledo, the company town of Kohler, Georgia, and the armed clash in Rhode Island, to stimulate

capital's first labor-law, with the workers no longer in the juridical position of a subordinate class.

The law was called "unfair" because it stipulated employers' obligations, but not labor's. Senator


18/34

Wagner's answer to this was: "No one would assail a traffic law because it regulates the speed at

which automobiles run and not the speed at which people walk."21 Roosevelt and the New

Dealers had, more or less clearly, understood that an economically advanced society cannot be

politically backward. If it remains backward, there will come a crisis, the blocking of the system's

functioning mechanism and a generally anti-capitalist revolutionary situation. According to

Leuchtenburg, "The New Dealers were convinced that the Depression was the result not simply ofan economic breakdown but of a political collapse; hence, they sought new political

instrumentalities." 22 In addition, "The reformers of the 30s abandoned the old Emersonian hope

of reforming man, and sought only to transform institutions." In this sense, Roosevelt's

experiment was "revolutionary" in the traditional bourgeois sense of adaptation of the state

machinery to society's developmental needs, of institutional up-dating with respect to economic

growth. Yet, there is an important difference. We no longer have the dominating presence of

ideology as the internal nexus of practical politics. The New Dealers worried about promoting

buying power as the springboard to further development, they called welfare projects labor-power

conserving measures, spoke of work for the unemployed, of markets for farmers, of international

commerce for industrialists, of national finance to bankers. The conservatives were the ones whoexpressed moral indignation against injustices added onto injustices. Roosevelt's "courageous and

tenacious experimentation" is not to be confused with the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian American

progressive tradition subsequently picked up by Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson. Here we have a

political leap, a pragmatic shift consciously approaching cynicism, an anti-ideological effort and

an aggressive anti-humanitarian charge behind which labor's hand can be seen pulling the strings.

Thurman Arnold was responsible for the anti-trust program. His polemic aimed precisely at the

progressivism of laws which, from the Sherman Act on, and in the form of what Andrew

Shonfleld called a "national religion," aimed at the "illegality" of industrial organizations rather

than seeking economic objectives. The folklore of Capitalism was thus a purely ideological

struggle against the power of the industrial empire. "Preaching against it, however, simplyresulted in counter-preaching. . . the reformers themselves were caught in the same creeds which

supported the institutions they were trying to reform. Obsessed with a moral attitude toward

society, they thought in Utopias. They were interested in systems of government. Philosophy was

for them more important than opportunism and so they achieved in the end philosophy rather

than opportunity."23 Richard Hofstadter has written: "Respectable people with humanitarian

values, Arnold thought, had characteristically made the mistake of ignoring the fact that 'it is not

logic but organizations which rule in organized society'."24 The labor struggle within the New

Deal had forced capitalism to put its cards on the table. After the crisis had forced it to become

politically modern, the advanced labor struggled forced it to reveal its class-character even to the

outside. This is not altogether irrelevant, if the aim is to hit the true adversary and not itsideological shadow. Again Thurman Arnold, in The Symbols of Government, claims that the

leaders of industrial organizations, by ignoring legal, humanitarian and economic principles,

"built on their mistakes, their action was opportunistic, they experimented with human material

and with little regard for social justice. Yet they raised the level of productive capacity beyond the

dreams of their fathers."25 The great capitalist initiative has been a labor victory if only in that it

allows us a crude knowledge of the enemy in its highest historical point. Afterwards it becomes

useless to condemn it: our only advantage is in using it.


19/34

In the Summer of 1933 Keynes published an article in the Daily Mailheadlined "President

Roosevelt is Magnificently Right." The thunderbolt had come from the United States: there would

be no stabilization of the dollar in gold. "Thus Keynes congratulated [Roosevelt]for cutting

through cobwebs with such boldness. The message, said Keynes, was 'a challenge to us to decide

whether we propose to tread the old, unfortunate ways, or to explore new paths; paths new tostatesmen and to bankers, but not new to thought'... "26. He was actually referring to himself. His

long fight against the gold standard, this fallen prince belonging to pre-war concepts, this

"bourbon residue," finally found an authoritative voice even willing to listen. England's "return to

gold" had been the clue that had allowed him to foresee two of capital's great mishaps: the 1926

English crisis, and the 1929 world-wide crash. The decision to re-value the pound by 10% meant

to "reduce by two shillings per pound" the workers' wage.

"The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill" will be found in the political strike, which from

the miners would broaden to the English working class, just a year after Keynes' prophecies: "The

working classes cannot be expected to understand, better than Cabinet Ministers, what ishappening. Those who are attacked first are faced with a depression of their standard of life,

because the cost of living will not fall until all others have been successfully attacked too; and,

therefore, they are justified in defending themselves. . Therefore they are bound to resist so long

as they Can; and it must be war, until those who are economically weakest are beaten to the

ground." 27 The other prophecy with considerably more terrifying consequences, would have to

wait only a few years to come true; "The gold standard, with its dependence on pure chance, its

faith in 'automatic adjustments,' and its general regardlessness of social detail, is an essential

emblem and idol of those who sit in the top tier of the machine. I think that they are immensely

rash in their regardlessness, in their vague optimism and comfortable belief that nothing really

serious ever happens. Nine times out of ten, nothing really serious does happen... Butwe run the risk of the tenth time (and are stupid in' the bargain) if we continue to apply the

principles of an Economics which was worked out on the hypotheses oflaissez-faire and free

competition to a society which is rapidly abandoning these hypotheses." These are words written

in 1925: the old principle stood, and the "tenth case" resulted. It was a great depression. "We were

not previously deceived. But today we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having

blundered in the control of a delicate machine the working of which we do not

understand."29 Threatened, capital's high science shows courage comparable to the great U.S.

political initiative. Keynes comes to the United States in June 1931 and again in June 1934. In the

meantime, on December 31, 1931 the New York Times published his open letter to Roosevelt.

Here the president was presented as the trustee of a "reasoned experiment within the frameworkof the existing social system."30 If it does not succeed, national progress will be blocked while

orthodoxy and revolution will end up fighting each other. But if it does succeed, "new and bolder

methods will be tried everywhere, and we may date the first chapter of a new economic era."31

The two see eye to eye. Keynes would minutely describe the president's hand, while Roosevelt

would write to Felix Frankfurter: "I had a grand talk with K. and liked him immensely."32

One of the two must have said, as Napoleon with Goethe, "voila un homme!" Harrod tells us that


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there was disagreement about the direct influence of Keynes' theories on Roosevelt's actions: "It

has been suggested that Keynes gave him the courage to conduct his operations on a grand scale.

Keynes would certainly have urged that; yet it may be thought that the President's own instincts

would lead him in the same direction." 33 It is more likely that Keynes' influence upon American

developments passed through somewhat different channels: "not through the President, but

through the clever back-room boys who had their ears to the ground."34 But this is not the crucialpoint. There is no doubt that, through one channel or another, Keynes reached the United States.

What needs to be shown, instead, is that the political situation of the American economy and the

U.S. class struggle influenced the formation of the central nucleus of Keynes' thought much more

than is generally explicitly granted by those who see this as a scientific danger. Writing about

Keynes, Samuelson has said that, like capital, science grows by gradual increments contributed

by individual scientists. Like capital, science has no boundaries. We always know the maternal

brain which makes the discovery. Yet, the true identity of the father of the conception remains

obscure and mysterious even to the discoverer. The seeds are many because the historical factual

framework is complex. Lord Keynes, who E.A.G. Robinson has called "a Cambridge product

from head to toe" -something immediately evident to everyone - is actually an Americaneconomist. It has been asked whether there would have been a General Theory without Keynes,

and the answer has been easily negative. But that was not the right question. The "Preface" of the

original English edition of the General Theory is dated December 13, 1935. This is the same

fabulous year which had already produced the Wagner Act and the CIO. Yet, it is during the

previous decade that the elements of the "Keynesian revolution" mature and explode. Already in

1924, in an article in The Nation concerning the debate opened by Lloyd George concerning a

program of public works as the remedy to unemployment, he showed the way towards a new

conception of political economy. Two years later, in "The End ofLaissez-Faire," he brilliantly

outlined fundamental concepts for the future. "We need a new set of convictions which spring

naturally from a candid examination of our own inner feelings in relation to the outside facts."35Yet, "Europe lacks the means, America the will, to make a move."36 From the 1926 articles on

the Lancashire cotton industry to the early 1929 pamphlet "Can Lloyd George Do It?" and "The

Means of Prosperity" of 1933, he continually reflects while checking whether others are up to

anything. Only when it becomes evident that the U.S. is willing to start moving do we finally have

the programmatic exposition of the theory. Science begins to unfold its discoveries in a logical

sequence, and becomes fixed and objective in a new classical text devoted to an altogether anti-

classic conceptualization of economics. The really serious question is whether it was possible to

have a General Theory without the great capitalist initiative, and with all that it followed: the

crisis, the struggles, and the U.S. - the land of both crises and struggles. Keynes used to say: "The

battery is not working, how will we be able to start?" If it was possible to have a new theory orpolitical economy without the more modern capital's first practical moves within the most

advanced labor domain, who comes first, Roosevelt or Keynes? The question is whether the new

ideas could obtain such a rapid success without the destructive lesson of things which had already

cleared the way of the most difficult dogma of the classical theory to die: "the difficulty does not

rest in the new ideas, but in avoiding old ones." The Treatise on Money was really the product of a

refined expert of monetary problems, and the last of the Cambridge economists from Malthus on,

in the same way that we saw Victorian England exhibit scientific pompousness in Marshall's


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Principles.

But behind the General Theory the horizon broadens. This could not have been produced by the

great English science of the past because it was produced against it. Furthermore, English present

history was already ruled out of any ambition in the production of another science. Thus, we are

beyond the fruit of the island and within a true ocean of very distant influences. We could call it aproduct of capital's world situation, but this would be another general way of saying specifically

that it was a product of the 1930 class situation in the U.S. Only in this fashion can we reconstruct

the relation between struggles and science in a higher level of development. We must not

superficially seek in Keynes the explicit terms of the labor question. In his How to Pay for the

War, he wrote that he never sought to deal directly with the problem of wages. His approach was,

rather, indirect. In Marshall's age, capital's high science could still ideologically gossip with the

working classes' unrecognized good qualities. At this point it is no longer possible. Here we have

come to the nitty-gritty, no matter how we want to translate the section of "A Short View of

Russia" concerning the "boorish proletariat" contraposed to the bourgeois and the intellectual

who are the "quality in life." 37 Once he had written that there was no state of mind more painfulthan one of continuous doubt, although the ability to have one he considered an indication of

political ability. He had no doubts concerning his social position, and he had no intention of

showing that he did. Yet, contrary to what is commonly believed, he was a better politician than

many professional ones. He personally practiced his 1933 motto aimed at the beginning

reformers of the time to the effect that when a doctrinaire goes into action he must forget his

doctrine. If Keynes could have directed politically the "capitalist revolution" as the theoretician of

the New Deal, he would have been an American Lenin.

At the time of the first great recruitment to industrial unionism one could read on CIO billboards:

"President Roosevelt wants you to join the union." Also, Roosevelt's personal efforts toreestablish union solidarity after the historical 1935 split are well known. The "great initiative"

needed an interlocutor from the labor side to maneuver within capital. But even before that, it

needed a new interlocutor. Without the New Deal there would have been no CIO - or it would

have come about much later. Yet, the success of the new capitalist policy urgently required the

updating of the tools of the labor organization. Most of all, it needed an extension of its control to

the new working class in the growing mass-production industries. But the opposite is also true.

The immediate and impressive success of the CIO can be explained only by means of the general

political atmosphere which had come to prevail in the land with the weakness of the individual

capitalists, and the inadequacies of the old labor organization. The new union leaders knew this,

and this is why they used the name of the U.S. president in their recruiting campaigns. Thepassword "organize the unorganized" was acceptable to both modern capitalism and the new

union. In recent history there are these moments of elective affinity between the two classes

when, each in its own camp, find themselves internally divided and must simultaneously resolve

problems of strategic location and of organizational restructuring. In such a situation we see that

the most advanced part of capital extends its hands to the most advanced part of the working

class and - unlike what could be thought from a sectarian viewpoint - the working class does not

reject the offer and the illicit relation, but happily exploits it for its own gains. Thus, the interests


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of the two opposed classes occasionally can coincide outside of the traditional sense of formal

political interest, when all fought together in the interest of democracy. The content of the interest

now acquires a material dimension: the call is no longer to one's right, but to others' duties. When

he spoke of labor demanding a voice in the determination of industrial policy, John L. Lewis

argued that labor "wants a place at the council table when decisions are made that affect the

amount of food that the family of a worker may eat, the extent of the education of his children,the kind and amount of clothing they shall wear, the few pleasures they may enjoy."38 He

screamed: thirty million workers want the foundation of a democracy of labor, but they also

demand "their participation in its concrete fruits." Through this path and with these words, the

mass of unskilled workers, immigrants, blacks and women flocked into the new industrial

unionism. Pelling wrote that: "In 1933 the AFL had seemed to be little more than 'associations of

coffin societies' as its critics called it - a group of artisans' benefit societies run by old men whose

only anxiety was to retain the friendship of management."39 It is the classical picture of any old

organization. And here, on the other hand, is the face of a typical new organization at its

beginnings. Writes Schlesinger: "In the wake of the do drive an almost evangelical fervor began

to sweep over large sections of American labor. The awakening of 1936 had, indeed, many of theaspects of a revival. Organizers labored endless hours and braved unknown perils, like

missionaries; workers crowded labor halls to hear the new gospel; new locals sprang out of

communion and dedication to pass on the good news ... it was, to a great extent, a singing

movement."40 Singing "Mommy's Little Baby Loves a Union Shop," towards the end of 1937 the

CIO had 3,700,000 members against the 3,400,000 of the AFL. It included 600,000 miners,

400,000 auto workers, 375,000 steel workers, 300,000 textile workers, 250,000 garment workers,

and 100,000 farm and ot

oc postscript

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